How Streaming and Playlists Help Determine Which Music Becomes More Popular

Not many streamed music even half a decade back. Today, you’ve most people listening to music on YouTube or services like Pandora, Spotify and MP3Skull.world. Streaming hit a milestone of sorts in 2015, when it attained as many as 67.5 million subscribers with more than $2.9 billion of trade revenue.

Before, it was the sales of CD’s that drove the music industry. Today, streaming plays a major role driving both the discovery and consumption of new music. While it is true that there would be fans who would be interested in buying in albums always, the importance given to streaming needs to be looked at again. Streaming is an important market today, and it cannot be ignored.

Taking the Next Step From An Album

The industry is still catching up with the concept of streaming – and most artists still consider albums as their primary area to sell. However, while labels continue to build up marketing campaigns and P&L’s, the value per user has skyrocketed to around $0.37 per free streamer in 2015. This is compared to the $2.80 annual revenue per subscriber in the same year.

If you’re looking at the average amount per album that you would get for every streaming user, you would find it a lucrative deal. This is because, on an average, music subscribers listened to around 66 streams every week. On the other side, the number of unique albums that were streamed in the entire year was just 47.

How Are Things Changing?

It is important to understand how the behaviour of music fans have changed. Yes, they still want their artists to come out with the next big album. They still want to purchase the new songs and to have them available in the market. Drake, for instance, has more than 46 million Spotify listeners, a testify to how popular online music streaming can be.

Paid streaming can bring in revenue, and sometimes, multimedia artist subscription bundles can help earn companies as much as $1.50 more per user apart from the standard streaming fees.

Albums aren’t the end

No, albums aren’t what it used to be before. Today, it is the playlist curator that can decide how much you would love new music. It is the music that you listen to while online and while you search for new music that is going to be more popular.

The research is pretty clear – you would need to embrace the new model of streaming playlists, and if you do not, you surely would be losing out in the future. Pretty much like those gramophone companies, that well, do not exist today.